John Kershenstein was assigned to the combat engineers because he had worked in construction. / Family photo

by Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY

by Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY

EVERGREEN, Colo. - A teenager as World War II raged in Europe, John Kershenstein scrambled for work to help support his family in the steel-mill town of Johnstown, Pa.

"Eggs were like 8 cents a dozen - but you had to come up with those 8 cents, and that was the hard part," Kershenstein recalls with a laugh. "It was a different way of life, but ... we had just come out of the Great Depression, so as boys growing up, we worked at anything that was available."

When his draft number came up, the then-17-year-old reported for duty with his older brother. Because of his experience working in construction, he was assigned to the 164th Engineer Combat Battalion. There, the Army taught him how to build barracks and bridges and, later, how to defuse ordnance and blow up enemy supplies.

After a short stint at Fort Meade in Maryland, Kershenstein did more training in Mississippi and Texas before boarding a Liberty Ship bound for England. There, he helped widen rural roads to accommodate the Army's wider 6x6 trucks and prepared for the invasion that they all knew was coming.

"We were all young men, young boys, you might say. It was exciting, and we realistically blew things up," Kershenstein says of his ordnance work. "We used real dynamite. ... It wasn't a game. You had to really pay attention."

When D-Day came, Kershenstein found himself aboard a landing craft and storming ashore at Utah Beach. His participation in the initial invasion would last just hours. After initially holing up in an apple orchard, Kershenstein and his unit climbed aboard one of those 6x6s and headed inland.

Then they got hit - and he doesn't remember anything more.

"I got blown out of the 6x6, and when I woke up, I was on an English hospital ship. I had a tremendous headache, I'll tell you, and a tremendous goose egg on the back of my head," he says.

"I've had people ask if I've been on a cruise." he says. "I say of course: a special cruise with food and clothing, and it was a very exciting trip. They even issued me a rifle!"

Kershenstein's fight wasn't over. After a short recovery in an English hospital, he was sent back to the front with a new unit, the 150th Combat Engineers.

He saw a lot of Europe over the next few months as the unit raced across France, Belgium and Germany, building bridges for the Allies while blowing up others to prevent their use by the Germans.

He also destroyed German ammunition dumps - the bullets and shells were incompatible with American guns, so there was no need to save them.

Targeting Germany's supply lines gave the Allies a critical advantage, Kershenstein says, when the Germans mounted the last-ditch offensive now known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Staring down from a barn loft with his comrades, their machine guns clutched close, Kershenstein says he could hear German soldiers dressed in American uniforms, driving American tanks.

"We thought they were Americans, but you could hear the German language. You just stayed quiet. If you started something, it was the end of everything," he says. He understood then that "if the Germans had had all the access to gas like they wanted, things would have been very different."

Hampered by a lack of supplies, particularly fuel for tanks, the German offensive was pushed back by Allied troops during vicious fighting that saw Kershenstein's unit pinned down in a forest as 88mm shells rained down.

"The first time you go through something like that, that's when you get religion," Kershenstein says.

While the war continued, Kershenstein returned to the States. He separated from the Army in late 1945. He went to college in Indiana and met his future wife there as she studied for her master's degree. They had two sons, both of whom served in the armed forces.

In civilian life, Kershenstein worked in marketing for several large electronics companies. He returned to Europe on business trips, at one point staying in a German city he once helped attack. A railroad station, he recalls, didn't survive his previous visit.

During that trip, his German colleagues innocently asked whether he had ever visited the area before.

"And I would say, 'Oh yes, I was through here a couple of times,'" Kershenstein says, a smile creeping into his voice. "But you don't continue fighting. It was all over."